Henk Rottinghuis

The General Management Of People: Delegation & Empowerment

The essence of good management I learned (sometimes the hard way) is to first find good people, and then grant them the freedom to carry out their job most effectively. This means accepting that they might do their job in a different way than you would have. Trying to be a perfectionist will not help you. You will never be able to manage more than you can handle in a single day yourself. You must give room to people having their own way of doing things.

If you want to manage something bigger, you have no choice but to delegate and that means reaching an agreement with your employees on where you want to be in a few years time. You choose a point on the horizon and apply your mind to what you have to do to reach it. Usually there’s more than one way to get there. But the question of which route to take is exactly the kind of decision you have to leave to the people with whom you have entrusted ‘delivery’ tasks.

I’m personally convinced that people gain more pleasure in their work when they are encouraged to think and talk about the shared objective and they get less value if there’s nothing left for them to chew on. If they do not perform well repeatedly or they abuse their freedom, you have to replace them. If they make mistakes, they should get the chance to repair them. Everyone makes mistakes, and although I hate mistakes, people cannot be terrified of making errors and taking certain risks. In this case, everything stops. Of course they should not make the same mistake twice. When you empower people, they should know they are held responsible and accountable. Within the FEI we must have measurable goals, benchmarks and milestones – whatever you want to call them to measure progress.